Canelo vs. Crawford was a massive fight that generated a lot of money and viewership, but some sports executives are questioning the viewing numbers that Neflix released for the fight, which ended up taking place at 1 a.m. eastern time.
According to Netflix, the bout pulled 36.6 million live global viewers the best numbers ever for a men’s championship title fight — an important distinction considering Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano 2 pulled 76 million viewers on the undercard of Jake Paul vs. Mike
Tyson.
But even that 36.6 million number is being questioned by people in the know, including FOX Sports president of insights and analytics Mike Mulvihill.
Mulvihill called bulls—t on the metrics, noting they were better official numbers for this year’s Super Bowl LIX game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, which did 33.8 million average viewers. That led the analytics wonk to question Netflix’s ‘non-audited data’ from VideoAmp, a rival to Media Ratings Council accredited Nielsen.
“The Eagles-Chiefs number is pretty good, but just imagine if it had been on at 1 a.m. and measured by VideoAmp,” Mulvihill quipped on X (formerly Twitter).
But are the numbers really cooked up? Mulvihill ignores the fact that the Super Bowl is big business mainly in the U.S., while boxing is a worldwide sport with a particularly large following in Mexico, where Canelo’s Mexican Independence Day fights are a national phenomena.
Netflix is known for having particularly a opaque ratings structure. They keep their numbers close to their chest except for rare circumstances like this where they put out press releases to celebrate their big wins. While Nielsen is the industry standard, it still employs a complex extrapolation of data collected from sample size of viewers. Netflix is drawing raw data from their own streaming servers.
Whatever you think of the official numbers, it does have us wondering: how big could the fight have been if it had ended up going on at 11 p.m. as originally planned instead of 1 a.m. in the morning? Despite Dana White’s reassurances that he’d fix the pacing for boxing events, we’ll never know.
